Thursday, March 19, 2009

I am pleased to announce to NLM readers that I have purchased a subscription to an interactive event calendar which will help to serve you in posting special liturgical events. (The point of purchasing rather than using the free version is that the subscription removes advertisements within the calendar, and also provides the ability for each of you to submit your own events for approval.)

For the moment this calendar is located at the bottom of the main blog itself, however, if readers find this is noticeably slowing down the speed of loading the site, please let me know and I will find another way to host the calendar.

So why add a calendar?

The NLM receives a great number of requests to announce particular events that are going on in your particular locales. Sadly, we have to let many of these slip by.

To that end, I sought to find a web-based calendar that would allow our readers to submit their own events into the calendar, while also being subject to some kind of NLM moderation to ensure some measure of quality control.

The intent here is not for people to list their regularly scheduled Masses. The intent is instead to provide a venue for people to list special Masses or liturgical events generally.

I hope you will find this of some usefulness. A link has also been provided in the sidebar which will take you down to this page.

A final reminder: if the presence of this calendar on the main page is causing any noticeable site slowness, please do let me know.

UPDATE:

1. Good initial responses to the Calendar so far. Just to note again, this calendar isn't meant to advertise weekly or monthly Masses in particular locations. That is what other groups provide.

2. Regarding Timezones and Times: Please ensure you fill out the proper start time (and a rough guess at a finish time) according to the time in the time zone you are in. The calendar defaults to a particular time zone (EST), but if your event is in England for example, and the start time would be 10:00AM in England, then please put it in that time. (It might be an idea to specify the time zone within your event description as well, just to avoid confusion.)

It doesn't do much good to list an event and then have people confused over the start time.

3. As well, please do not use the "All Day Event" option.

Keep in mind others may put in an event on the same day and so we need to be respectful of that.

A final note. To those who submit these entries, I cannot see who you are, so if there is a problem with your entry, I cannot contact you, and I may have to modify it myself or simply delete it.